uous assistance included facilitating visits, to arranging researchers’ interviews with staff members, to providing them with archival ma- terials to complete their work. Al Jazeera also provided other types of assistance such as suggesting research topics and helping students with the elaboration of methodological approaches suitable to their research topics. These efforts resulted, in building a growing network of media researchers who held several meetings during the Al Jazeera Forum. Finally, it is worth noting the participation of Al Jazeera’s staff in semi- nars, speaking and presenting research papers at conferences organised by universities and other research institutions, is also having an impact on the academic sphere. We conclude this chapter by drawing attention to Shawn Powers’s study on Al Jazeera in the academic field (1) . In this study, Powers men- tions the referral and quotation rate for research on Al Jazeera is five times higher than the average academic referral and quotation rate. With this in mind, we can say that Al Jazeera has contributed significantly to the development and advancement of media studies in the Arab world and elsewhere. After decades of focusing solely on specific types of re- gional issues such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, inter-Arab relations, na- tion-and state-building, oil industry and prices, many researchers now focus on Arab media as part of their interest in the region. As a final note on the sources, it should be mentioned that although the literature used in this chapter is voluminous and covers most of the academic research on Al Jazeera in the last twenty-five years, it is not a complete or exhaustive list in anyway. For one thing, the language bar- rier hinders access to research conducted in languages other than Arabic or English. Two, most of the literature to which this chapter referred, has been accessed online because of Covid-19 travel restrictions. This was a challenging task because many universities deny remote access to their research archives. Nevertheless, we believe the volume of sources used here is sufficient enough to reflect Al Jazeera’s presence in aca- demia and its wide-ranging impact on academic research.
(1) Shawn Powers, “Al Jazeera in Academia”, in Mapping the Al Jazeera Phenomenon , Ibid., pp. 153-188.
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